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The Origin of the Name "Treeleaf"

Someone just wrote to ask me where the name "Treeleaf" came from.

I believe (it has been awhile since I thought about it) that it was just a simple image of the tree springing out from the root, branching in all directions to individual leaves ... yet root, trunk, branches and leaves are Not Two ... all just the Tree. Because "leaf" and "tree" are one beyond one, I went with "Treeleaf" and not "Tree Leaf".

The Sandokai (the Harmony of Relative and Absolute) which we chant each month at Zazenkai says ...

Thus for each and every thing,
according to the roots, the leaves spread forth.

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Please take all my comments with a grain of salt - I am a novice priest and anything I say is to be taken with a good dose of skepticism - Shodo Yugen

Yes, it is Konoha Zendo. Nishijima Roshi wrote the name in Kanji for us, which is on our homepage. One point is that Nishijima Roshi may not have understood about the "Treeleaf" without a possessive, so the Japanese Kanji are Ko (Tree) "No (Possessive, similar to "de" in Spanish) and Ha (Leaf). And then I was too polite to point it out and ask him to change it. Oh well. It then occurred to me that I could simply take the "No" out of the image of his composition, and make it Koha Zendo, but do not want to change the integrity of his composition and Japanese folks tell me the sound is not so natural in Japanese. So, I leave it be ...

Thank you Jundo for this little clarification. its always nice to know the back story of things like that

also if someone wants to know who how it would sound in Russian or Hebrew...

Hebrew - Ale (leaf) etz (tree) it would most likely be said or written that way since it sounds more natural in Hebrew to say the leaf first, at least it does to me...
Russian - derevnoy (it means of a tree, the word tree is just dereva, but the word used would be to describe the fact its a tree's leaf) list (leaf, could also mean a sheet, therefor the explanation on the kind of leaf. it could also mean a sheet of paper or even a metal sheet, depends on the second word).

pretty pointless but still...

Gassho, Dojin.

I gained nothing at all from supreme enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called supreme enlightenment
- the Buddha